The Drowned Girls

Detective Angie Pallorino never forgot the violent rapist who left a distinctive calling card — crosses etched into the flesh of his victims' foreheads. When a comatose Jane Doe is found in a local cemetery, sexually assaulted, mutilated and nearly drowned, Angie is struck by the similarities to those earlier unsolved rapes. When a drowned young woman surfaces in the Gorge bearing the same marks, the hunt for a predator becomes a hunt for a killer.

Assigned to a joint task force, Angie is determined to prove herself in homicide. But her private life collides with her ambitions when she meets her temporary partner, James Maddocks — the man she met the night before in an anonymous encounter.

As the search intensifies, so does their mutual desire, and Angie's work inside the killer's mind shakes loose unsettling secrets about her own past. The Drowned Girls opens Loreth Anne White's Angie Pallorino series, set in Victoria, British Columbia.